The Breaking Ice is as aimless as its characters, whose outer orbital of disaffection keeps them hovering around one another, wandering around and smoking and staring at the dazzling neon lights with more attitude than purpose. In other words, there’s nothing here that hasn’t been assayed much more poignantly years ago by Hou Hsiao-hsien or Jia Zhangke. 

By Robert Koehler Howard Hawks thought that if a movie contained four or five memorable scenes, the movie worked. Anthony Chen, who won Cannes’ Camera d’Or for Ilo Ilo, would please Hawks. Chen knows his memorable scenes, and they usually involve two or more of a quartet of indelible characters stumbling and bumbling about a…